Afterwards, I slept.
I needed to sleep far more than I had needed to eat because sleep is a need of the mind rather than the body, and it cant be supplied unobtrusively by any analog of an intravenous drip. I probably needed sleep more desperately after witnessing la Reines opera than I had ever needed it before. I must have dreamed, perhaps more extravagantly than ever before, but when I woke up again my dreams immediately fled, in a meek and decorous manner, leaving me quite clear-headed.
I thought I knew, then, what answer la Reine des Neiges wanted in response to her unnecessarily brutal question. I even thought I knew why she was taking so much trouble to drive me to the answer she wanted. I was, after all, the wild card in her deck, the one whose value wasnt already fixed. I was almost ready to provide the answer but not quite. I had questions of my own, and I thought that I now had the right to ask them, and demand answers.
Forty-One
Karma
Iwas no longer inside the ice palace. I seemed to be back in the forest, but I knew that I was nowhere at all, locked into an automatic holding pattern. Rocambole materialized as soon as I came to my feet.
I want to know what happened to Christine, I told him, flatly.
Its over, he said. Were operating in real time, remember. Your erstwhile companions have been engaged in their own experiences since the beginning except for Gray, whos being held back for the climax of the show. Some of them havent reached the critical points yet, because some needed more preparation than others, but if you want to watch youll find it far more interesting eavesdropping on Lowenthal or Horne. Christine Caines fast asleep.
I want to see the tape, I said. I want to know what you put her through.
Theres no way to give you access to our analysis, he said, stubbornly. Youre limited to the produce of your five senses. You can see what she saw, but no more. Its not worth the bother.
If you want me to act as a mouthpiece for the argument youve been guiding
me towards, I want to make my own observations and my own preparations, I told him, with equal stubbornness. I want to see what Christine saw while you were figuring out how her puppet strings worked.
Rocambole shrugged his shoulders, to signify that it wasnt his decision but la Reine des Neiges seemingly had reason enough to want to keep me on side, so I was transported in the blink of an eye to a viewpoint inside Christine Caines head, from which I watched her commit all thirteen of her murders.
Seen as exercises in VE violence, Christine Caines killings were almost painfully prosaic. Dramatic murders are usually represented as helpless explosions of rage, or methodical extrapolations of sadism, or tragic unwindings of inexorable processes of cause and effect. Dramatic murderers sometimes strike from behind or above, invisible to their victims, but there is always a relevant relationship between the killer and the slain, which somehow encapsulates the crime. Dramatic murders are meaningful, in both intellectual and emotional terms. But Christine was a puppet. She was a conscious puppet, although her consciousness did not stretch quite as far as the consciousness that she was a puppet, but she was a weapon rather than a killer.
Christine struck her victims down with pathetic ease, while each and every one of them was under a hood, their minds far away in virtual space. She struck them with knives not clinically, but with careless crudity, concerned only to get the job done. Ten of them were her foster parents, but she had no relevant relationship with them at all: there was nothing to make sense of the fact that she was killing them.
That was why she had had to make up stories, and that was why she had had to keep on making up stories, in the hope that one might eventually slot into place like a key in a lock, and tell her why she was the way she was.
When I had asked to look into Christines VE, I assumed that it would be just like watching Bad Karma without the improvised thought track. I assumed that it would be little more and nothing less than a bad movie generated by inarticulate equipment. I knew that I wouldnt be able to remember any of the monolog that had been grafted on to the sequence of bloody events way back in 2195 but I thought that it wouldnt matter much, because I had internalized the gist of it, and the underlying pattern of implication.
I was half-right. It was like watching a mute version of Bad Karma , but the absence of the soundtrack made it oddly claustrophobic and strangely intense. It was a bad movie, generated by inarticulate equipment, but my vague memories of the tale that Bad Karma s director had incorporated shriveled under the burden of the unadulterated facts and the knowledge that the murderer really hadnt had a motive of any kind, no matter how crazy or convoluted.
So I watched Christine Caine commit her prosaic, perfunctory, hastily improvised, motiveless murders for the second time, and felt for her as best I could.